Open Science and Research Assessment Reform: Science Europe’s 2026 Position Statement

Science Europe’s April 2026 position statement, “Connecting Open Science and Research Assessment Reform,” argues that open science and assessment reform are not parallel projects but mutually reinforcing drivers of the same goal: research cultures that reward quality, integrity and collaboration rather than publication volume or journal prestige. Written for research funding and performing organisations, it recommends that the two movements be planned and implemented together rather than as separate policy tracks.

Research assessment reform is the movement to change how research, researchers and research organisations are evaluated, replacing narrow reliance on citation counts and journal impact factors with broader, context-sensitive judgement of quality and contribution.

What does Science Europe’s statement actually say?

Science Europe published Connecting Open Science and Research Assessment Reform on 30 April 2026, authored by Bregt Saenen and James Morris and assigned DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19886162. It is the output of a three-year collaboration between Science Europe’s Working Groups on Research Culture and Open Science, grounded in a 2024 membership survey and a scoping review of the academic literature on open science and research culture.

The statement’s central claim is definitive: aligned assessment systems and open science principles together enable research cultures that reward quality, integrity and collaboration, strengthening research and innovation systems and supporting diverse career pathways. It is addressed to research funding organisations (RFOs) and research performing organisations (RPOs), recommending strategic alignment of their open science and assessment-reform actions rather than treating them as separate work programmes.

How are open science and assessment reform mutually reinforcing?

Open science broadens what counts as a valuable research contribution — data sharing, open methods, software, public engagement — beyond the traditional peer-reviewed article. Reformed assessment is what makes that broadening stick: without evaluation criteria that recognise these practices, researchers have little institutional incentive to adopt them.

Science Europe frames reformed assessment as the structural foundation that allows open science practices to flourish, moving evaluation beyond “oversimplified proxies of excellence and flawed metrics” toward a fuller account of research quality and impact. Conversely, open science supplies the evidence base — transparent methods, shared data, verifiable outputs — that makes qualitative, context-sensitive assessment credible and auditable.

• Recognise a wider range of outputs and activities, including datasets, software, patents and public engagement, not only journal articles.
• Combine qualitative peer judgement with quantitative indicators, calibrated to research field and career stage.
• Incentivise openness and collaboration directly within funding and promotion criteria, rather than treating them as optional add-ons.

What does this mean for funder policy across Europe?

For funders, the statement is a direct call to stop running open science mandates and assessment-reform commitments as separate policy silos. Grant criteria, reporting requirements and reviewer guidance should be edited together, so that a researcher who shares data openly or publishes preprints is not simultaneously penalised by a review panel still anchored to journal impact factor.

This mirrors a broader European policy convergence. The OECD published its own report, Reforming research assessment for better science, on 29 April 2026 — a near-simultaneous release that signals shared momentum across intergovernmental and funder-led channels toward evidence-based, less metric-dependent evaluation.

How does this align with CoARA and the wider reform movement?

Science Europe’s statement does not stand alone. The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) finalised its Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment on 20 July 2022, per the European Commission, setting a shared direction for signatory research funders, performers and associations across and beyond Europe. UNESCO’s 2021 Recommendation on Open Science supplies the underlying normative framework, explicitly naming research assessment as a “dominant barrier” to open science becoming the norm.

Read together, these three documents show a consistent policy arc: UNESCO sets the normative case for open science; CoARA operationalises assessment reform through institutional commitments; and Science Europe’s 2026 statement provides funders and research-performing organisations with a practical rationale for sequencing the two as one connected reform, not two competing compliance burdens.

One concrete implication sits close to CASRAI’s own history. CASRAI originated the CRediT contributor role taxonomy in 2014. The standard is now stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. CRediT’s structured recognition of distinct contributor roles — data curation, software, validation, formal analysis — is precisely the kind of granular, non-authorship contribution that reformed assessment frameworks are designed to reward, giving funders and institutions an existing, adoptable mechanism rather than requiring one to be built from scratch.

Answer-first Q&A

What is CoARA and how does it relate to Science Europe’s statement?

The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) is an international alliance of research funders, universities and associations committed to reforming how research and researchers are evaluated. Science Europe’s 2026 statement builds directly on CoARA’s Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, adding an explicit open science alignment layer for its member funding and performing organisations.

What does research assessment reform mean?

Research assessment reform means changing the criteria and processes used to evaluate research, researchers and institutions — moving away from proxies like journal impact factor toward combined qualitative and quantitative judgement that accounts for diverse outputs, career stage and disciplinary context.

How does open science relate to research assessment reform?

Open science and research assessment reform are interdependent: open practices such as data sharing and preprints only spread if evaluation criteria reward them, while reformed assessment needs the transparency open science provides to judge non-traditional outputs credibly. Science Europe’s statement treats them as one combined reform agenda.

Who should act on Science Europe’s position statement?

The statement is addressed to research funding organisations and research performing organisations — the bodies that write grant criteria, promotion policies and institutional evaluation frameworks. Research administrators, publishers and developers of assessment tools are also directly affected stakeholders.

Implications and what happens next

For research administrators, the practical task is auditing existing grant and promotion criteria for contradictions between open science requirements and assessment practice — for example, mandating data deposit while still scoring applicants primarily on journal-tier publication counts. Science Europe’s statement gives institutions a citable rationale for resolving that contradiction in favour of alignment.

Expect national funders and CoARA national chapters to reference the statement as they revise assessment guidance through 2026 and 2027, alongside the OECD’s parallel findings. Institutions that wait for a single mandated template will lag; those that begin mapping open science indicators onto existing assessment criteria now will be positioned to demonstrate compliance as funder audits catch up with the policy convergence already under way.

See CASRAI’s research administration resources for related standards context, and the CRediT contributor roles for a working example of a granular recognition framework that supports reformed assessment.